Is DevOps the Next Pain in the SaaS?
Software vendors and developers are under a tremendous amount of pressure. They must deliver high-quality, reliable software that brings significant business value in a competitive market. These days, it often involves learning and adopting the latest tools and tech to create and maintain a DevOps pipeline. The intention is to automate the build-test-deploy process; to improve speed and quality; to gain greater control. Technology is supposed to make it easier…
Unfortunately, the reality can be very different for software vendors, who unlike larger corporates don’t have the resources to develop an in-house DevOps team. Instead, we find that they bootstrap it themselves with their existing team. Even if they could hire out for DevOps expertise, they are competing with big tech for talent.
At Servoy, we work with plenty of software vendors and see, firsthand, the talent and ingenuity that goes into delivering software products. There’s no reason to believe that these teams could not also master the tools and processes needed to create a DevOps pipeline. The real question is, should they?
In many cases, tech teams are responsible for maintaining the same legacy products that they are trying to modernize. At the same time, they may be onboarding new customers and delivering customizations. Sometimes the same people are even acting as front-line tech support. And even when they manage to build some kind of DevOps automation, it’s not a one-and-done effort. They will be maintaining it alongside everything else.
In the end, It’s a choice: where to spend limited human capital to deliver the most value. In many cases, software vendors feel paralyzed, knowing that their customers do not care about their DevOps investment, but also knowing that they cannot compete without it.
At Servoy, our mission is to deliver a platform which actually removes the technology burdens for building and delivering business software, including the DevOps conundrum. We believe that teams should be empowered to focus on their users, their business logic, and the value they deliver for their customers.
That is why we created ServoyCloud. We looked around and saw our community of developers were all trying to solve the same problem. Our goal was to create a low-touch control center to manage delivery, including automating branch-to-build, test and deployment scenarios.
Today ServoyCloud is helping teams by providing the following:
Source Control
Everything starts at the source – literally. ServoyCloud delivery pipelines are managed in repositories and controlled from source code. Every action, commit, configuration change, every resulting artifact is under revision control. Developers can be sure that each build is pristine and fully traceable. There’s no guesswork.
Build Automation
Generating software builds is not only automated, it’s completely flexible. Builds can be generated on-commit, on a schedule, or on-demand. Build automation jobs themselves are configurable, persistent entities, which contain every dependency and every option. Even the smallest changes in your stack are captured and reproducible. Create pipeline jobs for every scenario. Track every change. Never miss a beat!
Quality Assured
Each delivery pipeline can include several QA steps to guarantee that only vetted software builds are fit to move to the next step. ServoyCloud supports the following QA steps.
Complete Software Packaging
Of course every successful pipeline job produces deployable software binaries. But that is only the beginning. ServoyCloud pipelines create a complete package for every job execution, including:
Controlled Deployments
Of course, building and testing software is only part of the solution. Real DevOps control includes tightly managed deployments. That is why ServoyCloud pipelines can be connected to target “Environments”. As the final step in a pipeline, deployment is itself an automated process, which includes configurations and artifacts. ServoyCloud provides the following environment types.
We have lots more of the goodies and we’ll get into production scenarios in a subsequent blog.
Request a ServoyCloud Demo here =>